Flexible plastic containers have found considerable commercial success over the last several decades for storing and transporting refuse and disposables such as garbage, lawn clippings, leaves, as well as many types of commercial and industrial wastes. These containers have wall thicknesses on the order of 0.001 to 0.004 inches which makes them incapable of supporting themselves either in an open or a vertically erect position, so that it has usually been found necessary to either manually hold the bag open during loading or to use the bag as a liner for another rigid type container such as a rigid plastic or metal waste container.
The use of a secondary rigid container as a support has several disadvantages. These rigid containers in addition to being costly and heavy relative to the flexible containers, occupy considerable space when not in use. Another disadvantage is that the rigid containers, when lined, are essentially sealed by the flexible containers after filling, making the filled flexible container difficult to remove because of the suction effect created as the flexible container is being withdrawn from the rigid container.
Because of these problems there have been attempts to construct flexible bag supports from rods and wire members and some of these have been collapsible. For example, a plurality of collapsible bag stands or supports are constructed of wire forms with two inverted "U" shaped side wires. These are exemplified in the Valesko U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,364,534 and 4,469,300 and the Stroh U.S. Pat. No. . 4,467,989. In these bag stands the side wires fold toward and away from one another to achieve collapsing and set up, and the net result of this is that in the collapsed position the entire unit is larger in outside dimension than the individual side wires and this is a disadvantage in storage, although principally in shipping. Furthermore, these bag racks all require four bottom wires.
In the Vosbikian U.S. Pat. No. 3,633,859 a bag rack is shown having two inverted "U" shaped sides connected to two crossed "U" shaped bottom rods. The rack is not at all collapsible because of the crossed relation of its bottom rods 20 and 21 as well as the fact that they are pinned together centrally by a fastener 28.
The Champlin U.S. Pat. No. 1,971,642 shows a rack somewhat similar to the Vosbikian patent described above, except that it is collapsible into a single plane. However, the Champlin bag holder does not have top wires.
The Sturm U.S. Pat. No. 3,603,541 shows a collapsible bag rack where the rack collapses by bringing opposite corners together. This construction requires four bottom wires, four top wires and four side wires and is thus considerably complex.
Other patents showing tubular type bag stands are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 996,421, 2,783,010, 2,328,739 4,031,689, 3,836,037, 3,826,455, 3,161,391, 2,731,184, 4,487,388, 4,458,867, 4,299,365, 4,174,085, 4,372,512, 3,960,351 and 2,470,977.